The LOTR Family Tree Compiles a Mass of Lord of the Rings Info

In an endeavor to track and record every character to ever appear in J.R.R. Tolken’s fictional world of Middle-earth, Swedish chemical-engineering student Emil Johansson has started the LOTR Project: a Lord of the Rings family tree of epic proportions.

In his ongoing project, Johansson first determined the ancestry of all the characters in the book series and then went on to construct a timeline of events and interactive map of Middle-earth. However, since Middle-earth is also populated by people that don’t get mentioned in the books, Johansson performed statistical analysis on the characters’ race, gender and lifespan to determine what the population size of a given race would most likely be at a particular time. He also takes into account the disproportionate gender split (81 percent male, 19 percent female) that is representative of the world Tolkien talks about in his novels, but which might not necessarily reflect Middle-earth as a whole.

The LOTR Project was started in January 2012 and, since then, Johansson has released an Android app, which he tentatively plans to follow up with an iOS app -- just the thing to finally settle all those Lord of the Rings lineage squabbles.